“We only do that if a girl is pregnant and her parents are ashamed to let her be seen in public.”

The principal actually said that to your Mom? What in tarnation?

Makes me appreciate the principals I had more.

I think I’m gonna ignore the whole Palin resignation thing for a few days to a week. Maybe when I get back it will start making sense. There will be some small amount of perspective. Right now it’s just too coocoo for Cocoapuffs.

West Texas in the early 90s.  Context.  It wasn’t unheard of for angry parents to pull pregnant daughters from the world, and hide them at home, since there’s no more maternity homes to hide them in.

The principal denied her request, and actually said, “We only do that if a girl is pregnant and her parents are ashamed to let her be seen in public.”

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with my mother.

“Well, when I was in high school, none of the girls ever wound up pregnant.”

“Did they ever ‘go to live with their maiden aunt’, Mom?”

“Well, sure.”

“Did they ever take a year off to recover from some ‘undisclosed illness’?”

“Sure…”

“Did they ever ‘take a year off to study in Europe’, Mom?”

“Yes…”

Your mother was just trying to argue that reality is created by consensus. 

It wasn’t unheard of for angry parents to pull pregnant daughters from the world, and hide them at home, since there’s no more maternity homes to hide them in.

I don’t doubt that this happened. It probably happened in the suburbs of Chicago where I grew up, too. I was naive in high school, not very clued in.

The part that surprised me, though, was not so much that part. What surprised me was that the principal told your mom straight up that this was the only scenario in which work would be collected by the teachers for a home-ridden student to be able to study & keep up with classes. I don’t understand the educational reasoning, is what I really mean. Were the teachers unusually over-worked, or something?

Um, didn’t she have Trig while in office?  If you can handle having one baby while in office I don’t see why you’d resign over a second one.

You raise valid points, especially in light of what we know of Palin’s behavior with her last (supposed) pregnancy.  So first she didn’t tell her staff she was pregnant until she was VERY far along.  Then she cooks up a crazy birth story where she was in Texas giving a speech and her water broke, yet she decided to give the speech anyway, hopped two planes to Alaska (she had to wait a couple of hours in a Seattle airport to catch the Alaska flight for total flying time of about 12 hours) and then got in a car for a 2-3 hour drive to the hospital to give birth.

Regardless of whether Palin was really pregnant, she is not beyond concealing a pregnancy for as long as possible and lying about the circumstances of the birth.  She would NEVER leave office if she were pregnant again.  What would be the point?

She was served a subpoena I bet.

Also, I think, the main reason to doubt any pregnancy scenario is that Palin wouldn’t quietly resign over it, citing 300 other reasons that don’t make sense.  If she decided to resign, she would go out with a huge parade celebrating the Unborn Fetus, and she would make sure to note that she decided to give up her career to focus on the Fetus, rather than deciding to have an abortion to stay at work.

Not to mention that she already went through a pregnancy while in office.  She didn’t have to go into quarantine then, why would she now?  It just doesn’t make sense without some kind of serious scandal, and there’s really nothing scandalous about getting pregnant. 

(Note, however, that this leaves open the possibility that it there it really does just flat out make no sense.)

The whole idea is more stupid than offensive. Although it may be offensive in its stupidity. Who knows.

I think the most likely reason is that there is some massive legal problems coming her way. However, other options are likely.

Here’s a theory I just thought of…coming from the idea that it makes no sense. What if this, for some unknown reason is basically a /ragequit?  Personally I don’t think this can be ruled out.

For those who don’t know, a /ragequit is MMORPG slang for a sudden quit out of a group or a guild for what usually is some small slight. Actually, the more I think about it from this PoV, the more I could see Palin pulling this stunt. She just has that type of personality where she has to be the alpha or she’ll take her ball and go home.

You got mono a second time?  How does that work?  Is it like a cold, or the flu where there are actually a bunch of different strains of mononucleosis running around?  Or was it a simple case of relapse?

I’m praying for a sex scandal.  Proof that she really did have that affair with Todd’s partner.  While I consider this highly unlikely, it would certainly put the last nail in her coffin.  Repubs can easily forgive an ethics violation or two or a financial swindle.  But a married woman having an affair with her husband’s friend?  Tsk tsk.  Republicans do not like “slutty” women.

You know I read the headline about what Sanchez said on the Huffpo and I almost lost it, but not because I was offended by the sexism - I was offended that that stupid fuck makes more money than I ever will okay?  And so should everyone else be offended by that.  Amanda got it exactly right - why the hell would she resign because she was pregnant?  You idiot. 

All over the msm the punditry is taking ques from people like Bill Kristol - is this a good career move?  Is she setting herself up to step into the void of leadership on the right and become the defacto leader of the Republican party and frontrunner for 2012?  Ed Schultz was going on about this last night.  And he too, makes more money than m ost of us ever will.  And that’s the outrage okay?

Because Sarah Palin will be lucky if she’s not in a federal prison by 2012.  And the larger story is; first Jindal explodes in primetime.  Then John Ensign.  Then Mark Sandford.  Then Sarah Palin.

The Republican party is in the biggest crisis I have personally ever seen any political party in.  They are either going to go the way of the whigs, or there is a leader we haven’t yet spotted out there.  And considering who the base of this party is, who that leader may end up to be is a frightening prospect.

Rick Sanchez is a stupid distraction.

It is possible that one of her daughters is pregnant again, outside of wedlock. That would be a scandal, especially if it turned out to be the 14-year old after a week of Letterman getting attacked for making that joke!

In my high school, the administrators were extremely supportive of teen moms, to the point of having policies of naptime and hall pass privileges.

Of course, seeing skinny cheerleaders grow enormous and sport honking varicose veins, swollen ankles, and turn up at school exhausted and harried looking did wonders for contraceptive use.  I only knew one girl who was out of school for pregnancy - a 15 year old with a complicated twin situation.  I think there were even barriers to withdrawing girls from school for pregnancy, as state law was pretty strict about it at the time.

That said, my vote is for scandal and not pregnancy.  Either that, or Turd wants to run for something and told her to quit.  Pregnancy hasn’t changed her plans before, to the point of travelling on a jet liner in labor and endangering Trigg in the process.  I don’t think it would exactly stall her now.

“Nor can you catch it from sitting next to someone in class….”

Since when?

How would the GOP be not noisily worshipping at the feet of a visibly pregnant Sarah Palin?

Here, they have a ‘pregnant school’, where they place all the pregnant girls from the high schools in town under one roof.

I know that because one of my tutoring clients went to the school, not because she was pregnant, but because she had some mental health issues, which is the other class of kids that get placed there as well.

atheist, it was because the amount of money they get from the state every year depends on how many students attend school in that school for how many days, and apparently, if a kid takes more than X number of sick days, the school doesn’t get the cash for that kid.

Maybe she is quitting to start a day care center.

Ahh, thanks, Amanda, that makes sense. I should have figured it would be something like that. More punitive school policies, and their unintended consequences. Only this time the punishment seems aimed at the schools themselves, for whatever reason.

Sure, she’s pregnant. But not by Todd. It’s by a sperm donor mutually chosen by Sarah Palin and her lesbian lover—her left-wing lesbian lover. She has to leave GOP politics.

atheist—what you have to understand is that even principals know these days that schools aren’t for teaching, they’re for warehousing.  So it’s inconceivable to them that anyone would have actual academic aspirations.  Thus, the only way to get school at home is if it’s a punishment, just like getting school at school is.

Punditus Maximus, maybe, but I think some of that apparent attitude is more the outcome of high-level policies than a hardened belief on the part of teachers and principals.

There’s a kind of mono that reoccurs, and I managed to get it.  I had two bouts, but my poor aunt who got it from me had 4.

There are two ways you can have it twice, one is that the initial virus makes you sick again—it remains in your bloodstream for life (which is actually a bad sign, it may mean immune issues) and the other there are (at least) two viruses that cause it, the Epstein-Barr virus and Cytomegalovirus.  This I know because I (probably) got it twice.

I’m with whoever mentioned the subpoena. She’s likely facing some serious ethics charges and is running away while she can. Not to mention that running around the country being the darling of the right wing fringe and raising money is way easier than, you know, governing.

At which point my mom said, “But being pregnant isn’t being sick!” Nor can you catch it from sitting next to someone in class, unlike some of your finer communicable diseases.

Wait, wait, what?

‘Scuse me - I have to go talk to someone about goddamned child support.

atheist—that’s why I said “even principals.”  They’re close enough to the ground to know better, but they’ve been defeated by the heinousness of our society’s terror of its teenagers.

Ah, it looks as tho the scandal where Palin and Todd exchanged contracts for the big whopping Sports Center in Wasilla with the same companies to build them (each) a house. More or less.

A good ole corruption scandal, but maybe even more so for Alaska.

There may be more: even tho Palin has been in office a short time, she so wallows in entitlement, and is likely to have wrangled more illegal greed. (Remember charging the state a per dieum for living in her own house? That kind of nerve may well be the tip of the ice berg.)

So, yeah, the pregnancy retirement is also unlikely as well as offensive and sexist and just basically stupid.

Okay, this writer researching a book on Palin covers every reason EXCEPT a pregnancy: her corruption, history as a quiter, a possible book deal, lack of interest in actual governing, and so on and so forth.

“Some pundits have said that Palin’s resignation is out of character. Hardly. Don’t forget that she resigned from her last statewide office—that as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Sarah Palin is a quitter. She fancies herself something else. But, in the end, she quit her position at AOGCC and she has now quit her governorship. That’s two-for-two at the statewide level. In Wasilla, there was nearly a recall launched against her as mayor. Trouble and turbulence have followed her everywhere.

More importantly, there are rumors in Alaska that more Ethics Act charges are in the works and that there is also a more serious Federal investigation focusing on Palin during her tenure as mayor in Wasilla and the building of her home and a sports complex in Wasilla, long speculated to have been linked. It’s the one very touchy subject whenever you bring it up in the MatSu Valley. As someone who is writing a book on Palin, I can attest to the fact that there are always rumors flying about her, not all of them true, but this seems like a real possibility, especially given the timing of her announcement today.

Palin also has a multi-million dollar book project for Rupert Murdoch that she needs to complete in time for a spring release. That’s some serious cabbage, and there were grumblings in Alaska about the book deal as well. There will be other lucrative, high-visibility media options for her shortly down the road. Don’t be surprised to hear of one of those popping up soon. This frees her up to reach for the gold ring without her minions being able to register any complaints. In that respect, it’s a logical move.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-dunn/the-real-story-behind-pal_b_225636.html

I do like the idea floated on Huffingtons that she’s going for a gig on Fox or some other pundit haven, being too lazy or disinterested in actually governing.  Let’s face it - she’d be perfect as a wingnut pundit.  And, God help us, she’d be even more irritating and with us for longer than the reigning alpha blowhard.

Also: after years as a hot-air pundit, Palin could run for government again (think: Fred Thompson) on her hot-air fumes.

http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/palinbull.jpg

I found the conspiracy!

Um, didn’t she have Trig while in office?  If you can handle having one baby while in office I don’t see why you’d resign over a second one.

This.  She’s BEEN pregnant in office.  She rode to Vice Presidential Candidacy on it—her choice to carry Trig and not to have an abortion somehow means she’s anti-choice. 

As for another daughter being pregnant?  Again, she weathered THAT.  If it’s Bristol, well, Bristol is a Slut Queen who even tried to say abstinecne didn’t make sense and that she would have preferred if Darling Grandson Tripp came 10 years later.  She didn’t marry Levi, showing uncommon good sense there, but also showing the Base that she’s a Slut Queen who’s not Really Sorry she had sex.

So…it’s not Sarah’s fault if Bristol, Slut Queen, is pregnant again, since, well, Slut Queen.  Bad Seed.  Sarah gets an even bigger pass for the first pregnancy, especially if she throws Bristol on the streets and takes custody of Tripp.

Willow pregnant?  Statutory rape.  She should shoot him, b/c that would go over with the Base.  She wouldn’t quit her job over it.

I’m hoping for jail, but it could just be a gig on Fox ala Huckabee.  Pregnancy?  Simply not a possible problem for Sarah.

Perhaps the stars are coming into alignment, and she wants to return to R’yleh as it arises…

You know what gets me?  All the whining RedStaters claiming Sarah is resigning to save her family.  The MSM is just shredding her, you know? 

As if Obama hadn’t had to take MUCH MUCH WORSE from them.  They STILL won’t let go of the birth certificate/idiot Manchurian Muslim narrative.  His degrees are as worthless as Sotomayor’s; simply handed to him as affirmative action prizes.  All he does is read off a teleprompter, and he doesn’t even do that very well.

Palin tosses word salad, doesn’t read newspapers, ‘you betcha’s her way through debates, is involved in multiple ethics issues, apparently risked Trig’s life by refusing to be checked in an ER when she was in labor, choosing instead to board a plane for an extended flight.  Reporting any of these facts is picking on her and her family in a way no other politician has ever faced.

C’mon, this is Sanchez we’re talking about. Last I heard, no one had ever accused him of being the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

Piator:

Perfect in what sense? The term “yammering dingbat” has been going through my head, but I’m not sure if “dingbat” is too sexist to be appropriate. (I never thought it was, but I could be wrong.)

Joining in the school-pregnancy off-topicking: When I was a freshman in high school I sometimes got rides home with my friend from her dad, who was a teacher at our school. One day the drive was interrupted because he had to stop and drop off materials at the local alternative school. Upon getting back into the car he informed us both “This is the school where girls who get themselves pregnant go.”

(I ended up going to that school within a year. Not because I was pregnant, because I was having anxiety attacks at the larger “regular” school. It was a fantastic place where students of all kinds who would have had trouble at a conventional school were able to succeed, but all that moron could see was warehousing for shameful sluts).

Perfect in what sense? The term “yammering dingbat” has been going through my head, but I’m not sure if “dingbat” is too sexist to be appropriate. (I never thought it was, but I could be wrong.)

Perfect in the sense that she’ll have a permanent and substantial base of fans, possibly more rabid than Rush’s fan club.  “Blithering idiot” is hardly a disqualification for the gig.

I don’t think that Phoenician has the cultural reference here - Dingbat was the pet name for Edith Bunker, wife of the homophobic, sexist, racist everybigot Archie Bunker on the 1970s series “All in the Family”.

Ms Kate:

That’s why I was wondering about it. I have always been under the impression that the term isn’t especially loaded (at least compared to words like “bimbo”)—hell, I’ve been called that—but I don’t really know.

Thank you, Ms Kate - I did not know that.

“This is the school where girls who get themselves pregnant go.”

I can only hope he wasn’t a biology teacher; his understanding of the basics was just a wee bit flawed.

I’m hoping for jail, but it could just be a gig on Fox ala Huckabee.  Pregnancy?  Simply not a possible problem for Sarah.
Caren-Sun-blocking Creator of Animorphic Pancakes on 07/04 at 06:15 PM

Uhm… sorry, I CAN see some plausibility in this, here’s why: Her other pregnancies were all pretty well spaced, and you know that Christian large family ideology - pump out the babies so you won’t need to buy your (older sib)  future womenfolk baby dolls.  That’s worked pretty well for Ms Sarah, up until ole Bristol went and decided any baby she cared for was gonna be her own.  ANd read between the lines on the (GQ?) interview w/ Todd.  Little Ms Willow doesn’t seem like the interested in kiddies type.  And if sis Molly has decided (and Palin may have promised her an only until the election is over scenario) she’s done parenting Sarah’s kids, too, and if Todd has decided he no longer wants to be a SAHD and it’s time for him and back to the North Slope now, then Sarah may have finally met what lots of other parents go through on a daily basis - finding responsible daycare.  But the wingnuttery doesn’t look well upon outsourcing parenting duties to other than family , so…....

Yeah, it is plausible.

I doubt that, Phylospher.  If only because Palin’s corruption makes her family’s who-stays-with-the-kids argument quite unique.  Dad usually wins because he makes more, but the Palins treat all of Sarah’s posts like extensions of their own personal credit line.  Forcing Palin to be the SAHM means they all get off the gravy train.  Todd may be perfectly employable, but how many people’s jobs offer the opportunity for free houses?  And it makes no sense to give up your political career to appease your voters if by doing so it means you no longer need their votes.  Besides, Sarah would have time and money on her side.  It would be months before the kid was born, and they are not part of the America that worries about childcare costs.  If it’s a baby, she has plenty of time to come up with an acceptable solution, especially considering that among her wingnut base, she can do no wrong.  Consistency is not their strong point.

I’m guessing indictment.  She’s certainly done enough shady stuff, and while she enjoys inexplicable grassroots popularity, she is an embarrassment to the larger Republican party.  Plus when it comes to abusing her power, she’s no Dick Cheney.  There’s plenty of material for her enemies to work with if someone smarter and more important than her has decided it’s time to throw her under the bus.  I’m guessing she suffers from an over-inflated sense of her own importance, and didn’t realize until it was too late that when the Token Chick plan failed, the amount of support and protection she could expect evaporated.

“This is the school where girls who get themselves pregnant go.”

I can only hope he wasn’t a biology teacher; his understanding of the basics was just a wee bit flawed.

Hee hee. No kidding. No, he was the shop teacher, with the good old boy male chauvinism that I think muct be inherently attendant to shop teachers, at least ones over a certain age.

Amanda nailed it - keeping your kid home = loss of school dollars. You would be amazed at how disinterested schools can be in the fact that, say, your kid has pneumonia, or that you might not want to have your entire family infected with the Blue Plague of Death currently tearing its way through the student body. They want your kid’s butt in the seat, and whether your kid is doped to the gills on cold medicine to avoid actually keeling over at his/her desk is truly not on their Give a Shit agenda.

Palin doesn’t seem to care much about indictment; there was some hint in one of the news stories about a non-profit job, so perhaps she’s going to a higher-paid position at some GOP policy or PAC group, where she can be a professional bombthrower and prep for 2012.

If her lawyer is stupid enough to follow through with his threat of a suit for defamation, then the fun begins.  The first thing any decent lawyer for a defendant would do is get Ms. Palin to give a deposition when she has to answer questions under oath, which mightn’t be to her liking when the questions turn on whether or not she accepted free materials from the same contractors who built the sports arena in Wasilla when her lakeside house was built.

I have a friend who’s an Evangelical Born Again Christian and her daughters attended a private Christian school. If a teacher became pregnant, she was required to take leave as soon as she started to show. Even though the teacher was married, physically able, and fine to teach, she was OUTTA THERE. When she told me that, my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe such a thing happened now.

Ironically, her daughter got pregnant twice before she finally got married. She was eight months pregnant when she did get married.

“The first one’s always early.”

Another tangent on the “keeping kids home = loss of school $” theme.  I remember a professor in an Ed. Policy class I took years ago making the point that an advanced alien race trying to understand Earthlings by looking only at educational policy would conclude that the human organ of learning is the butt, because of the extreme emphasis in policy on the number of hours said butt is placed on a classroom chair. On some level it makes sense - it’s an easy thing to measure, and in most cases learning is more likely to occur if the butt is in a classroom chair as opposed to, say, sitting on a blanket at the beach. On the other hand, attempts to base funding on ‘outcomes’ has given us things like ‘No Child Left Behind’, so maybe butts-per-day funding isn’t so bad.  At least the school has more control over the use of funds.

Jaded, the problem with NCLB isn’t that it’s based on outcomes, though “teaching to the test” is a problem - it’s that the restrictions are too tight in some places (not enough accomodation for non-native speakers or learning disabilities) and too loose in others (states lower their standards to give the appearance of competency). Also, it’s underfunded, which results in (among other things) more non-math/English teachers getting fired.

Yet another tangent on the same theme: schools shoving kids into AP classes that shouldn’t even be in honors, because they get grants based on how many kids take the AP, not how many pass.

“This is the school where girls who get themselves pregnant go.”

Now that women have figured out how to reproduce on their own, men have really become completely obsolete.  Conservative men were scared enough when women figured out how to earn money and mow lawns without them.  Now we should just round them all up and kick them out of the country, since they’re completely useless.  This applies to wingnut men only.  Normal men have good qualities that are useful to society.

It’s by a sperm donor mutually chosen by Sarah Palin and her lesbian lover—her left-wing lesbian lover.

Sleeping with Sarah Palin disqualifies you from calling yourself “left-wing.”

But a married woman having an affair with her husband’s friend?  Tsk tsk.  Republicans do not like “slutty” women.

I don’t know. I have a feeling she could apologize and sound sorry and make it go away as easily as any male Republican adulterer. I think for these people it really does change everything when you’re on their team, even if you have a vagina, and that probably gives it even more special poignance. I have a feeling her fans will defend her no matter what, given the trouble they’ve gone to on her behalf before.

My mom hid her (fully married and legit) pregnancy for a few months to finish out the school year in the early 60’s.

“I don’t think that Phoenician has the cultural reference here - Dingbat was the pet name for Edith Bunker, wife of the homophobic, sexist, racist everybigot Archie Bunker on the 1970s series “All in the Family”.”

In our family, post-Archie (I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen the show) a dingbat was the stretchy toy the dogs got to play tug-of-war with.

Palin aborted her first term!